A single mom for 7 years and now living in a blended family, Meg blogs about her life experiences before and after re-marriage.
“In the most turbulent times, God’s power is revealed. Join me as we walk, and sometimes run through the ups and downs of this life journey!' - Meg Lovett

Mom Nearly Escapes Human Traffickers? More Like Fear-Mongering!

I, like any parent try to be aware of dangers to my family. It is important to do our due diligence to protect and shelter our families from harm. This desire is taking a very dangerous turn in leaps and bounds all because of social media. What is going on in our culture that so many viral articles are leaving us paralyzed as parents to the potential dangers in society? Articles that have no substantial evidence but are based purely on speculation and feeling are being shared in droves. It is no longer validated information, but outright fear-mongering that is happening on social media! Just because you can have a voice on social media doesn't always mean that you should.

Fear-mongering or scare-mongering is the spreading of
frightening and exaggerated rumors of an impending danger or the habit
or tactic of purposely and needlessly arousing public fear about an issue.

Wake up parents! Read between the lines and use your heads. The stories I read are remarkably emotional and have no substance other than someone "thinks" that something could have happened. You will become consumed with these warnings and will fail to enjoy life if you are always looking for the bad guy. The "boogie man" if you will. What are we teaching our children when we give in to such fears and irrationality?

I know that evil is in the world and that bad things do happen all the time. We absolutely need to be aware of real threats, but parent with smarts and instinct, not fear.

Below, is an article that has been floating around social media. This is a perfect example of a viral fear without relevance or evidence. Dramatics at it's finest. I'll leave the article found on SNOPES.com below for you to read but my point is this: Don't believe everything you read online. Spoiler alert: It may not all be true.

People chuckle when that statement is made but look how quick people were to forward this article and "freak out" that their children are at risk! Now, I'm not saying that there isn't reason to be on guard because human trafficking is very real. What I am saying is that our culture is going to become quite cold if we continue to parent in fear. If we look at the person who compliments our children as someone who wants to harm them or over analyze someone's motives to create the story fear has placed in our head, we are going to be consumed in a very bad thing.

Be your own person. Investigate before you spread a rumor or story. You never know what chaos you are spreading or eliminating by using your own wisdom before you give into fear.

The fear outlined in this article, my friends, does not come from the Lord. Wisdom however, does.

______________________________________________________

CLAIM

A Southern California mom experienced a near-miss abduction of her daughter by human traffickers at a local IKEA store.

RATING

UNPROVEN

ORIGIN

On 23 March 2017, Facebook user Diandra Toyos
shared a photograph said to have been taken inside an IKEA furniture
store somewhere in Southern California, along with a common claim: that
she and her family had narrowly avoided abduction by human traffickers
while shopping there.
Toyos’ report was widely disseminated via social media and was also aggregated by a share-focused site called inspireMORE.
Like many other accounts of its kind, it began with Toyos’ saying she
had read similar stories on Facebook (i.e., that human traffickers
commonly ply their trade within chain stores) and went on to explain
that fellow shoppers inside the IKEA behaved in a vague manner which
convinced her she and her children were potential targets of a crime:

I recently read a post written by a mother I didn’t know, that went
viral. She described an event that happened to her while she was at
target. She and her children were targeted by human traffickers. She
talked about how when she reported the incident after the fact, she was
told that this was a very common way they worked.
I read things like that, and I always think “wow, that’s so scary… I
need to be careful”. But I also always think “that could never happen to
me.”

But you guys, it did.

A few days ago, my mom and I took the kids (I have 3 kids. A daughter
who is 4, and two sons, 1.5 years and 7 weeks) to IKEA … We were in the
couch section and the kids were enjoying climbing on each couch and
trying them out … I noticed a well dressed, middle aged man circling the
area, getting closer to me and the kids. At one point he came right up
to me and the boys, and instinctively I put myself between he and my
mobile son. I had a bad feeling. He continued to circle the area,
staring at the kids. He occasionally picked something up, pretending to
look at it but looking right over at us instead. My mom noticed as well
and mentioned that we needed to keep an eye on him. We moved on… and so
did he. Closely. My son wandered into one of the little display rooms
across from the couches and I followed him closely with my baby strapped
to me. My mom said she watched as the older man dropped what he was
doing and quickly and closely followed us into the area. At the same
time, she noticed another man dressed more casually and in his 20s. He
wasn’t looking at us, but was walking the same circling pattern around
us as the first man. My mom and I decided to sit down and wait for them
to move on. We had a gut feeling something was going on, but we hoped we
were wrong and they would move on. So we sat in one of the little
display rooms. For close to 30 minutes. And they sat too. They sat down
on one of the couches on the display floor that faced us. That was when
we knew our gut feeling was right and something was off. They sat the
whole time we sat, and stood up right as we got up. We continued on and
my mom turned around and realized the two men had moved and were sitting
only one couch away from each other, still facing our direction. The
older man was still watching us. She made eye contact… very clearly
letting them know that we saw them. And we moved on. We managed to lose
them at that point. (We talked with an employee, circled back and used
the bathroom and went out into a different section). But still kept the
kids right with us the whole time. I kept the baby in the sling which
kept my hands free and my eyes too. I didn’t have to keep an eye on the
stroller AND two kids… I just had to watch my older ones. When we got
through the maze of IKEA, we reported what happened to security.

At this point, we note that IKEA is well known for its unique (and
occasionally frustrating) store layout that essentially directs
customers to follow one another on the same path throughout a store — a subject addressed by Professor of Architecture Alan Penn in a 2011 talk about related planning structures:

[A student] followed people around the store — and guess what
[customers] do — they walk around like this. You can see the sort of
lines of people. In fact, if you shop in Ikea, all you do is follow
people around the store. You very seldom find people going the other
direction. You do occasionally but they are always looking very harassed
… You can only give in and follow the route that they set out for you,
because to do anything else is really difficult.

In her lengthy post, Toyos listed inferences based on her
observations of the men in IKEA, among them that they were unaccompanied
by wives, were not talkative, were not dressed in a fashion similar to
one another, didn’t smile at people, and were at one point adjacent to
one of the store’s exits. And she asserted that human trafficking and
the abduction of children from chain stores such as IKEA and Target is
“happening all over [the place]”:

These men weren’t shopping. While they walked around the store, they
weren’t looking at things… not really. The older man would occasionally
pick something up and act like he was looking at it, but he’d look right
over the top of it at my kids. Then he’d drop it and move on as soon as
we did.
They weren’t waiting for anyone. Often you see men in a place like
IKEA waiting for their wives, but these guys appeared to be alone. They
didn’t even talk to each other. They didn’t talk to anyone. They didn’t
smile casually at people (in fact, early on, I looked at the older guy
when he got close to us and smiled… which is something I do regularly
when I’m out.. I’m always making eye contact with people. He instantly
looked away. That was odd to me).
They were dressed nicely but very differently. I would never have put these two together. And they didn’t appear to be together.
The area they were hanging around had an exit right by it. IKEA is a
massive confusing maze of a store. But they could have run out that exit
with my child and handed them off to someone waiting outside and been
gone before I could find them.
Something was off. We knew it in our gut. I am almost sure that we were the targets of human trafficking. This is happening all over.
Including the United States. It’s in our backyards. I’m reading more
and more about these experiences and it’s terrifying. If not that,
something else shady was obviously going on. Either way, as parents, we
NEED to be aware.
Please PLEASE be aware when you’re out with your children. It’s not
the time to be texting or facebooking or chatting on the phone. When
you’re in a public place with your kids, please be aware and present so
that you don’t become a victim. Had I not been paying attention that
day… or had I let my kids roam and play while I checked my phone… I may
have lost one. The thought just makes me completely ill. (Especially
because I’ve been guilty of this!)
Also, in hindsight, I would have taken a picture of the guys. Probably right in their faces so they saw me do it.
Trust your gut. It’s there for a reason.

Toyos replied to commenters by denying that the men could have been
loss prevention officers and reiterating that parents ought to watch
their children in public, asserting that her belief was based on “what
[she knew],” that the men “were up to something,” and that such
occurrences were happening regularly across the United States:

Something was not okay here. This was not a situation that I
misunderstood. Do I know 100% what harm these men intended? No. I’m
taking an educated guess based on how things played out and what I know.
But even if I am wrong about their specific intentions… I KNOW they
were up to something and focused on me and my children.

Presumably, Toyos was referencing the barrage of near-identical
Facebook posts in which women have reporteclaim they had close brushes
with human trafficking rings in Target, Walmart, mall parking lots,
or craft stores. Rumors fitting that template began appearing in force
on social media in May 2015, when a woman shared a later-debunked
tale about an Oklahoma Hobby Lobby store.
In June 2015, Twitter was awash in fears of a sex slavery ring targeting college kids at summer job interviews; and later that same month a long-circulating theme park
abduction urban legend popped up again. Variations on that theme
included a harrowing (yet false) story involving purported teenaged
abductors (armed with heroin-filled syringes to drug victims) at a
Denton, Texas, Dillards,
a claim from a woman swearing she was a near-victim of human
traffickers with gift bags in the parking lot of a Hickory, North
Carolina, Walmart store, and a spate of rumors claiming Target stores in Tampa, Longview (Texas), and Houston were hotbeds of sex trafficking scouts.
Almost universally, such reports were found to be based on
misunderstandings, overstatements, embellishments, and not infrequently
outright fabrications (including a woman’s claim about an unsettling
encounter at a Michigan Kroger store and a convoluted scheme involving free rings from Kay Jewelers).
Similarly, nearly all such reports were appended with lengthy
commentary about how the purported near misses were in fact exceedingly
common and could happen to anyone.
Missing from the constellation of these hair-raising tales was
documentation that abductions are commonly (or even rarely) being
carried out in the described manner, as crime statistics don’t seem to
back up claims that such a ruse is truly happening “all over.” Free
Range Kids author (and advocate for reason-driven parenting) Lenore
Skenazy addressed
the uptick in such reports on social media, pointing out their illogic
and pleading for a realistic approach to the growing number of social
media abduction horror stories:

What the heck is going on, America? This “My kids were about to be
trafficked, I just KNOW it” post is so shockingly similar to last
week’s, “My kids were about to be trafficked, I just KNOW it” post that
it feels … creepy. A lot creepier than being at Ikea where a couple of
men glance at my kids.
The reader who sent me this link asked if I thought there might be
some “validity” to it, to which I must respond: No. In fact, I think
it’s crazy. What, two men are going to grab two or three kids, all under
age 7, IN PUBLIC, in a camera-filled IKEA, with the MOM and the GRANDMA
right there, not to mention a zillion other fans of Swedish
furnishings?
Can we please PLEASE take a deep breath and realize how insanely
unlikely that is? How we don’t need to be “warned” about this? How
NOTHING HAPPENED!
You can TELL nothing happened, because the whole thing was described
as an “incident.” And Lenore’s #1 Rule of Reporting is: When something
is called an “incident,” it’s because nothing happened. In fact, my
alternate headline for this post was:POINTLESSLY TERRIFIED MOM URGES OTHER MOMS TO BE POINTLESSLY TERRIFIED

As noted above, Skenazy cited the prevalence of such tales as drivers
of the belief “this is happening” everywhere. Moreover, she observed
that the dozens of near-identical narratives do not match known patterns
of abduction or trafficking:

So while we’re at it, here’s a snippet of last week’s note from David
Finkelhor, head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, on the
likelihood (or not) of sex trafficking of young children in America:

Child abduction rarely occurs in a crowded public venue like that, where help would be easy to muster.
Moreover:Most sex trafficking lures and abductions are of teenagers.
We have been so brainwashed by talk of trafficking that we imagine we see it everywhere.

We attempted to contact Diandra Toyos via Facebook for further information but have not yet received a response.

90 Percent of Everything. 10 April 2011.
Skenazy, Lenore. “The Modern American Brag: ‘My Kids Were About to Be Trafficked, Too!’”Free-Range Kids. 27 March 2017.inspireMORE. “Mom of 3 Evades Human Traffickers in IKEA After Noticing These 4 Warnings.”
27 March 2017.